Henry Dewing's Blog

Last week both Cisco and Microsoft made wide-ranging announcements around their unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) portfolios. On Friday, Cisco added to its barrage of collaboration announcements (Cisco Proclaims Their Collaboration Intentions) with the introduction of:

Cisco Prosumer Video (Launching a new Flip video camera for the enterprise and the software to enable IT and information workers to manage video).

This announcement was on the heels of Microsoft’s TechEd, where cloud-based development platforms and services were a hot topic of conversation; Microsoft used the stage to continue to illuminate its intentions to make Microsoft Office Wave 14 products available in the second half of 2010. In talking with Moz Hussain, Director OCS Technical Product Management at Microsoft, just before TechEd, he stressed two things about Microsoft’s UC solution:

The full capabilities of UC&C are available based on deployment of Microsoft OCS, SharePoint, and Live Meeting.

Microsoft solutions are fully interoperable with other leading UC&C vendors.

Moz hinted broadly at the purpose and usefulness of the recently founded Unified Communications Interoperability Forum to deliver independent interoperability testing and/or certification, but the full scope and role of that organization is still being finalized.